Nov 17, 2012

This morning I finally retired my AMD Phenom II X6 1090T CPU from my primary desktop. I had been using it since April 30th 2010, right when it first came out. Looking back, it's interesting to think the power that $309 bought back then and the $185 on the FX-8350 brings today. Just from a numerical standpoint, 6x3.2ghz (19.2ghz) versus 8x4ghz (32ghz) is mind blowing in my opinion. 12 years ago nearly to the day I was about to buy my first 1ghz AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" Socket A CPU. What is also interesting is that 2.5 years later AMD is still using AM3/AM3+, which for a consumer is great. Knowing with a simply bios update I can run the latest CPUs is a great to know. In my case, doing a bios update on my ASUS M5A99X EVO to get support for the just recently released Vishera series of FX CPUs from AMD.
[caption id="attachment_1639" align="aligncenter" width="300"] AMD FX-8350 Tin[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1641" align="aligncenter" width="300"] AMD FX-8350 installed into my ASUS M5A99X[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1642" align="aligncenter" width="169"] AMD FX-8350 installed into my ASUS M5A99X[/caption]
After installation with no surprise, the FX-8350 showed up properly and automatically increased my memory speed to 1866mhz (previously with my Phenom II the max available was 1600mhz).
[caption id="attachment_1643" align="aligncenter" width="300"] AMD FX-8350 showing in the UEFI bios of my ASUS M5A99X[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1644" align="aligncenter" width="300"] AMD FX-8350 Detailed Info showing in the UEFI bios of my ASUS M5A99X[/caption]
CPU-Z:
[caption id="attachment_1645" align="aligncenter" width="300"] AMD FX-8350 in CPU-Z[/caption]
And now the most interesting aspect of any upgrade. Can I justify the cost of the upgrade, especially when applications hadn't seemed sluggish.
Integer Benchmark Results:
[caption id="attachment_1647" align="aligncenter" width="300"] jcBENCH Integer Benchmarks[/caption]
Floating Point Benchmark Results:
[caption id="attachment_1648" align="aligncenter" width="300"] jcBENCH Floating Point Benchmark[/caption]
I included a few extra CPUs recently benchmarked for comparison. First thoughts, Integer performance over the Phenom II X6 is over 200% across the board for single to 8 core applications/games, meaning the FX-8350 can do what the Phenom II X6 did with half the CPUs leaving the other half for other tasks or making multi-threaded tasks 200% faster theoretically. This is also shown in the A10-4655M CPU, in 4 threads, my laptop was actually faster than my desktop as far as integer only work is concerned. Kudos to AMD for making such a dramatic difference in integer performance.
Floating Point results were a bit more interesting. Having seen quite a bit drop off in comparison to the Integer results, I was curious if the FX-8350 would hit the same hurdles. Sure enough because of the drop off of the 1 to 1 relationship between Integer Cores and Floating Point Cores in the Phenom II architecture in favor of a 2 to 1 ratio in the latest generations of AMD's CPUs, the Phenom II actually beat out the much higher clocked FX-8350, albeit the more threads, the less of an impact it made.
Definitely more benchmarks will ensue with real world tests of Visual Studio 2012 compiling and After Effects CS6 rendering. Stay tuned.